Launch of AMD's Radeon R9 290 (non-X) is reportedly pushed back by a week, to Tuesday, November 5, 2013. The card was expected to launch on October 31, 2013. The reason for this delay? AMD reportedly developed a new driver that significantly improves performance on the R9 290. AMD pushed this driver onto reviewers at the last minute, and asked them to re-bench their R9 290 samples from scratch, extending their NDA till the 5th. The driver reportedly makes the R9 290 extremely competitive with GeForce GTX 780. A side-effect of that would be that the recently launched Radeon R9 290X could be rendered unattractive. It remains to be seen if the driver also proportionately improves performance on the R9 290X, and how AMD ends up pricing the R9 290.

review sites should also be testing whether AMD has been playing dirty with their drivers and false-optimization, I smell something fishy here, you don't suddenly "improve performance significantly" without some sort of sacrifice being made somewhere. AMD was caught doing this a while back to trade performance at the cost of quality loss, so I'm curious if they are still doing this to meaninglessly boost benchmark results.

That`s good news for both camps means cheaper in an over worked over taxed over debt world....So i keep reading that the 290x is bios flash-able any news if the remaining locked out shaders on this bad boy can be re-flashed to 290x and then we have a really good war

This is what most guys that bought a 290x should have waited for ,IN my theory ,its if I Spend lets say $459 for the 290 and flash it to 290x specs, How much is in my pocket after ........

review sites should also be testing whether AMD has been playing dirty with their drivers and false-optimization, I smell something fishy here, you don't suddenly "improve performance significantly" without some sort of sacrifice being made somewhere. AMD was caught doing this a while back to trade performance at the cost of quality loss, so I'm curious if they are still doing this to meaninglessly boost benchmark results.

So the Green has not oh they are the almighty Graphics Gods ...really dude look up the green team also got caught a few times.It is Monkey see Monkey do world you now,Also they both got caught price fixing ......

review sites should also be testing whether AMD has been playing dirty with their drivers and false-optimization, I smell something fishy here, you don't suddenly "improve performance significantly" without some sort of sacrifice being made somewhere. AMD was caught doing this a while back to trade performance at the cost of quality loss, so I'm curious if they are still doing this to meaninglessly boost benchmark results.

That`s good news for both camps means cheaper in an over worked over taxed over debt world....So i keep reading that the 290x is bios flash-able any news if the remaining locked out shaders on this bad boy can be re-flashed to 290x and then we have a really good war

This is what most guys that bought a 290x should have waited for ,IN my theory ,its if I Spend lets say $459 for the 290 and flash it to 290x specs, How much is in my pocket after ........

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my reliable source told me that this card will have price point MSRP US 449$

Someone at OC.uk already tried to re-flashing this card to 290x with Asus R9-290x bios but unfortunately its shaders could not unlocked

Gibbo said:

**UPDATE**

Hynix and Elpida are both just as good as each other.

I took my Elpida card which could only do 5700MHz, flashed the Asus BIOS to it, pumped up the voltage and now the Elpida card is matching with 6600MHz.

So there you go, Elpida, Hynix, it don't matter. What matters is voltage control.

Asus BIOS FTW.

By the way this is an R290 I've flashed with R290X BIOS, works a tread, but shaders not unlocked, but can now hit 1220 core and 6600 RAM on the regular R290 as well. At these speeds this also obliverates Titan. Incredible value!

review sites should also be testing whether AMD has been playing dirty with their drivers and false-optimization, I smell something fishy here, you don't suddenly "improve performance significantly" without some sort of sacrifice being made somewhere. AMD was caught doing this a while back to trade performance at the cost of quality loss, so I'm curious if they are still doing this to meaninglessly boost benchmark results.

seriously dude, what's wrong with you ?
are you afraid that this card would do more serious damage to nvidia?

relax dude

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calm down son, seems like you are the one who flared up about me merely suggesting tech sites should take a look at the issue. Not pointing fingers here or anything but a full in-depth review of not only performance but image quality should also be considered.

review sites should also be testing whether AMD has been playing dirty with their drivers and false-optimization, I smell something fishy here, you don't suddenly "improve performance significantly" without some sort of sacrifice being made somewhere. AMD was caught doing this a while back to trade performance at the cost of quality loss, so I'm curious if they are still doing this to meaninglessly boost benchmark results.

review sites should also be testing whether AMD has been playing dirty with their drivers and false-optimization, I smell something fishy here, you don't suddenly "improve performance significantly" without some sort of sacrifice being made somewhere. AMD was caught doing this a while back to trade performance at the cost of quality loss, so I'm curious if they are still doing this to meaninglessly boost benchmark results.

You want fishy stuff? How about lowering the price of 780 by more than $100 in one night? How about suddenly getting ready to present a new revision of 780 the B1 that will be called "GHz edition".
I am pretty sure that there is nothing fishy here. They couldn't lower the price a month ago, and they weren't selling A1 chips while having a B1 revision ready for months.
Keep supporting Nvidia blindly.

calm down son, seems like you are the one who flared up about me merely suggesting tech sites should take a look at the issue. Not pointing fingers here or anything but a full in-depth review of not only performance but image quality should also be considered.

You want fishy stuff? How about lowering the price of 780 by more than $100 in one night? How about suddenly getting ready to present a new revision of 780 the B1 that will be called "GHz edition".
I am pretty sure that there is nothing fishy here. They couldn't lower the price a month ago, and they weren't selling A1 chips while having a B1 revision ready for months.
Keep supporting Nvidia blindly.

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what LOL? now price cuts are bad? and companies releasing more competitive products are considered bad? HILARIOUS

The amount of irony cheerleaders tossing around these days is simply mind-blowing.

review sites should also be testing whether AMD has been playing dirty with their drivers and false-optimization, I smell something fishy here, you don't suddenly "improve performance significantly" without some sort of sacrifice being made somewhere. AMD was caught doing this a while back to trade performance at the cost of quality loss, so I'm curious if they are still doing this to meaninglessly boost benchmark results.

review sites should also be testing whether AMD has been playing dirty with their drivers and false-optimization, I smell something fishy here, you don't suddenly "improve performance significantly" without some sort of sacrifice being made somewhere. AMD was caught doing this a while back to trade performance at the cost of quality loss, so I'm curious if they are still doing this to meaninglessly boost benchmark results.

You would have a point if not for that, in your own article you linked, AMD fixed the driver, bring quality back to what it used to be, with no performance hit. GCN was a new GPU architecture.

Likewise the 290 uses a new GPU that is not even released yet, it's normal from both green/red sides to see nice driver performance boosts following a GPU introduction.

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Exactly my point, AMD got caught, so they had to fixed it, and now I'm merely suggesting these sort of tests be considered again for future reviews, is it really worth this much discussion? its simply amazing that fanboys get so mad about the littlest things its like women on PMS.

Exactly my point, AMD got caught, so they had to fixed it, and now I'm merely suggesting these sort of tests be considered again for future reviews, is it really worth this much discussion? its simply amazing that fanboys get so mad about the littlest things its like women on PMS.

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Nope not fanboys or anything ,Your post made it sound like it is "You Basically accused AMD of driver tampering and never included Nvidia`s tampering or the price fixing" . And your not even running any of the AMD drivers on your system are you ,They have had major improvements the last few beta`s Shit a 20% improvement in BF3 and Bf4 in the last 2 betas(which are at least 3 weeks old) and your accusing them of tampering when your not even using their hardware. So who sounds like the fan boy now....